Voted

49% of my current constituancy voted four years ago. They voted for Labour, well, enough of them did.

58.9% of my current constituancy voted yesterday. Enough of them also voted for Labour for Meg to keep her chair, but it took ages to find this out. Mostly, it took ages because the polling stations were unable to cope with the demand.

Unable to cope.

40% of the people in this area could not be bothered to walk, put six ticks in six boxes, and decide who would help rule the country on their behalf, nor their local council. That’s quite good.

Why is it good? Well, with 60% of the area voting, there were multi-hour queues and people being unable to vote because of the cut-off time. Imagine what would happen if the entire area gave a fuck? Where would we be now?

Because of the fact that 10% more people gave a fuck, we didn’t get either General or Local election results until 15:00, at which point we learnt that Labour had won the whole shooting-match for our local area. Independent Candidate Denny de la Haye, who campaigned on a platform of direct democracy, got 96 votes including mine and his. Another candidate was down under the party alias of “Direct Democracy (Communist) Party” got 202 votes, and I can’t help but wonder if some of that is from people who meant to vote for Denny. OTOH the member standing for the Communist League got 102 votes by themselves, so possibly not. Hackney’s non-major-party list appears somewhat oversubscribed, with 12 different possible MPs to choose from, 5 of which I’d never heard of before I saw the final candidate list.

(Yes, we had two different communist factions standing against each other. No, I do not feel the need to make a joke about them working together.)

Generally the entire election has been one large advert for Proportional Representation, unless you’re in one of the top two parties, and even one of those has seen the light.

Talking about seeing the light, Barking and Dagenham cleaned their council of BNP members, and a record turnout saw Nick Griffin personally told to fuck off where he came from.

In the end, it appears a lot of the people who said “I agree with Nick” went and bottled it in the booth, leaving LibDems short on seats, but it also gave a new set of people an appreciation for the online echo-chamber: Sadly it doesn’t extend to the real world every time.

And finally, the ghost writer who wrote Danny Dyer’s column for Zoo magazine got Danny Dyer some kind of record for worst advice in an ‘advice’ column – a hotly-contested award. The magazine has a) made a donation to Woman’s Aid, b) Apologised completely for the entire massive-ratings-boosting encounter, c) Stopped paying Danny Dyer not to write a column with his name and image on it, d) Pointed the army of justy angry critics at a man who is guilty of allowing someone else to write under his name and, basically, said “Go, sic him!”